Hi, everybody. Since self improvement is kind of in the air this time of year, I thought I would choose our twenty twenty two episode on mindfulness. We cover its origins, how it became a thing in the West, and the upsides and yes, drawbacks. I hope it changes your life for the better. Enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here ish and this is stuff you should know Ish. This is full on stuff you should know.
Charles, remember that point. I feel like it was about.
Ten eight to ten years ago where everyone was just saying ish on the end of things instead of saying, like, you know, finding the real word that they were looking.
For, so so like an approximation of the word or of the thing they were describing. So like I'm say forty.
Ish, No, not even that, like when there's like a real word that could be used and they would just throw ish on another word.
I don't know what you're talking about.
No, yeah, it was it was the thing it swept the nation.
When was it?
Or maybe I'm thinking of the macarena.
That's what you're thinking, okay, all right, man really did sweep the nation? Remember that who let the dogs out? It was like a.
One dogs out? Did they ever find that out?
No? I think it was a rhetorical question.
Ish.
It's the kind of rhetorical question you could ask yourself, Chuck while you're meditating. Yeah, my first, thanks, thanks, But I'm going to step all over the segway because before we get started, Chuck, I want to do, if you'll allow me, another shout out for my little niece, Mila's movie, big time movie called No Exit that's coming out as far as when this episode drops tomorrow, so February twenty four,
twenty twenty two. No matter when you hear this, just immediately go on to Hulu subscribe it you haven't yet, and check out my niece Mela in No Exit because she is me the trailer amazing. What'd you think?
It looks like a taut thriller. She looks fantastic from what you can tell from a trailer. I you just saved all the bad parts for the movie.
I don't think they did. I was reading an interview with the director and he was saying like she was doing such an amazing job of being terrified and freaked out and everything that, like after in between takes, like the other cast, Memers would be like are you okay? And she'd be like, yeah, are you okay? And I'm acting right yeah exactly. She's like, it's acting like John Lovegrad. Yeah. So on Hulu, No Exit, February twenty fifth, my niece Mela just kills it.
There you go, can't wait.
Thanks again for that, So let's get started. Thank you for not passing judgment on that. Either way.
You're resegueing, because we're trys passing judgment, it means I'm not being mindful because a big part of mindfulness you just did not judge.
Yeah, So that's like, this is one of those ones, you know, those episodes where we just start talking about the thing without defining it. This is not gonna be one of those episodes because I think it would be kind of rough otherwise, you know.
Yeah, And I guess if you're gonna define mindfulness, you need to kind of go back in time. I mean, I guess we could hop in the way back machine.
We haven't done that way it's been a while.
Let's pull the old cover off. It's quite dusty in here and a little bit of mildew, A little mildew. There's some old crystals boxes. Those are yours?
Remember you had them accidentally delivered to your house?
Right, and then we went back to the Old West to celebrate.
You're thinking of back to the future. Three?
Oh right, right? Right?
I called Mary steam Virgin if I get to play her, not date her or anything.
Oh date may steam Virgin. A big crush on.
Her, isn't that really? That's a ted Danson's old squeeze, right.
It's his current squeeze. I'm not going to fight any before.
Are they still together? Yeah?
I think so.
Gosh, they've been together for a while.
Yeah, good couple.
Okay, great, good stuff.
So who knew we were gonna be talking about ted Danson at the beginning of mindfulness?
Richard Gear, But ted Danson's a big surprise.
If we get in the way back machine and go back uh in time to sort of the beginning of Buddhism, you'd have to look at the the the language polly and the word sati. Polly is p a l i, Sati is s a t i. There are a lot of different words for mindfulness, but the one that we can kind of identify with It's kind of been used most from Polly, which is a Middle Indo Aryan liturgical language from the early branches of Buddhism.
Yeah, I want to take in the reason that Polly is so important is because they say that it was the language of the Buddha, and at the very least it was the first language that the Buddha's words which have been passed down orally were written down in. So it's like legit old school Buddhist thinking and teachings. And one of the basic parts of that is, like you said, sati, which has been translated to mindfulness, but it was translated by a British colonial administrator, wasn't it.
That's right, And it kind of more accurately is translated as memory of the present, which I think is a really kind of a cool way to look at mindfulness.
Yeah.
Absolutely, it really kind of reveals what's going on. Especially once you kind of learned a little more about it, you're like, that actually works about as perfectly as can be. But it got translated into the word mindfulness, sati into mindfulness by a British colonial administrator in Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka. Back in the eighteen eighties, so as some British guy who said sati means mindfulness and actually kind of gave it to us today, although there was
a long period where it had been forgotten. But I think you can't really talk about mindfulness, even though it's changed so dramatically, especially in the last decade or so, without kind of describing what it was originally meant to describe, or what it still describes if you're a practicing Buddhist, and that is that you are not only like paying attention to the moment and like experiencing this moment without letting your thoughts wander to the past or the future
or anything like that, but that whatever you're experiencing in the moment, no matter what it is, you're experiencing with equanimity, which means that you're not passing judgment on it, good or bad or anything else. It just is And it sounds easy to describe, but if you've ever tried it, it's one of the hardest things a human being can ever set out to do.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's very very natural for a human to seek out and contemplate and think about the things that feel good and please them and to try and stuff down and get rid of and avoid things that either hurt literally hurt or emotionally hurt, or things that are painful or unpleasant. And boy, see, that is a tough thing to overcome, my friend. Just the condition of being human makes that very difficult.
But yeah, and you just nailed it on the head, not once, but twice, Chuck when you said that it's a very human condition. And part of sati. The point of sati as far as like Buddhists are concerned, is that it's a step that you take on the path to enlightenment to free yourself from the cycle of life and death and rebirth and to become like a truly
enlightened being that's freed from all of that. And so you have to free yourself from that human condition, and a big part of that is to free yourself from yearning from wanting. Because yearning and wanting or being repelled by something and wanting to get away from it, there are two sides of the same coin as far as sati is concerned, which is you are wishing that something is different or was different than it actually is. And
then that's the basis of suffering. And suffering is the thing that keeps you in that cycle of life and death and rebirth. So meditating to become mindful and non judgmental about your present experience is one step toward relieving yourself with suffering and then freeing yourself from that shackle of being born and reborn and reborn again.
Well, you and my friend have just spoken about the noble truths in part because craving is the cause of suffering is the second noble truth, and to cease that craving will bring about the ceasing of that suffering, which is the third noble truth. And basically, experiencing the moment without and everything about the moment without judgment is sort
of the goal. And you know, for modern you know, we're going to talk a lot about sort of the beginnings of mindfulness and kind of how it's become kind of a hip thing to do here in the United States starting in about the nineteen seventies and on especially today. But we're kind of talking in American modern terms about
stress and de stressing. And the Buddhists have a term for that, which is duka d u kk h a, and that is, you know, again, to avoid or destroy something that we don't like, and what we usually don't like is something that's going to put a stress on.
Us, right exactly, And they're saying, like, dude, this is part of the point of life. This really amazing book by Tick not Han right now rereading it. Actually, it's one of those ones you just kind of go back and reread, very like easy slim volume. It's called No Mud, No Lotus, and it basically says like, without suffering, you can't have happiness and vice versa. Pretty basic stuff, but like he really gets into explaining how to confront suffering
and understand that it's just part of life. And that's a huge part of the Buddhist approach to mindfulness. It's not to get away from suffering. It's to recognize it as it is and also simultaneously not make a bigger deal out of it than it is, because suffering is enough. It's bad enough as it is. But another part of the human condition is to make it way worse by anticipating it, worrying about it, like focusing on it after
it happens. There's a lot of stuff we do to our own suffering that explodes it, and part of mindfulness training is to is to stop doing that as well too.
You ain't kidding. And the lack of judgment is a big, big part of all of this. And we're going to talk quite a bit here and there about John cabot Zen, who is as easy, far and away the sort of leader of the modern American mindfulness movement in a lot of different ways, and we'll get to him in more detail later, but he says that awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, and that's another big part of it.
It's a very purposeful practice.
Yeah, but not meditation, which we'll get to that as well, because meditation is a true physical practice that you in mental practice, whereas mindfulness is more of a state of being that you're trying to get to, right. But he says on purpose in the present moment and non judgment only, they always have to kind of hammer home the lack of judgment being a key part.
Right exactly. And he's a proponent in kind of one of the founders of what you can refer to as secular mindfulness, which is this current incarnation of mindfulness that's sweeping the West. It's like you said, hip that's been kind of like removed deliberately, as we'll see, removed from its Buddhist roots and Buddhist contexts to make it more palatable and scientific seeming. Yeah, secular, secular.
Strip it of all the religion and maybe we can sell it to Americans exactly and then that.
But the yeah, the upshot of all this, though, Chuck, is that no matter who you are, where you're coming from, if you're talking about mindfulness, you're talking about paying attention to the present moment and doing the best you can at not judging anything that's going on in that present experience and just taking it on its face value and engaging in it fully. That's mindfulness in a nutshell.
Yeah, And it's not anything that the Buddhists had a corner on. They just probably did it better because all different kinds of religions throughout antiquity had you know, chanting or some kind of mindfulness practice, maybe prayers or through songs or dance. You know, that kind of thing has been around as long as people have been practicing religion. So the Buddhists did not invent it, but I think they got it fairly right.
So let's talk a little more about how we got here today. Historically speaking after a break. What do you think about that?
It sounds great. I'm gonna breathe in the meantime.
Hey, let me teach you something I've been using that tik not Han taught me, not personally but through his writing in a book that was published that I purchased with MONI.
Smash your hand with a hammer.
Yeah, he said, try to focus on anything else. Chump.
Right.
There's a bunch of different mantras you can say, and I don't not even sure that's the right word, but one that I keep using is And it's just striking what taking a breath and deliberately focusing on that breath, just breathing in once and breathing out once can do to like just suck you right out of wherever your mind is in the past or the future. It's it's really striking how it can do that. But his was it's a breathing in I noticed that I'm alive and
then breathing out. I'm happy to be alive, and just doing it at once like immediately brings me back into the present moment. It's really cool. I like it. It's all very new for me, but I think it's it's pretty cool.
Yeah, there's a lot of value there. And you know you can like practice something like this and those breathing techniques. It's not exclusive to mindfulness or meditation or Buddhism. I you know, that's a great technique if you have kids.
I found that.
You know, if my daughter is having a bad time, just kind of get her to slow down and take a couple of good deep breaths.
Always a good thing to do. Yeah.
And Emily, who you know, someone who has a lot of anxieties in her life as a struggling small business owner. We will do this thing where we have hug breathing, where I will go up to her and we will have a good tight bear hug embrace and will breathe in together, and it sort of like doubles the power of it.
Wow, that's neat, Chuck, Is that your own? Did you come up with that?
Yeah?
I mean I'm sure, I mean I didn't get it from anywhere, but I'm sure I didn't invent that.
It sounds like a Viking mindfulness.
Like Hell's Angels.
Sure, Yeah, that's the Hell's Angels technique you came up with. You can call it whatever you want. It's your invention. It's a good one.
Yeah, there's something about breathing together that close physically. It's pretty powerful.
So if you went back a few hundred years, a couple hundred years even, and you spoke to any Buddhists around the world and said, hey, how often do you do mindfulness meditation? They would look at you like they had no idea what you were talking about. And if you said, you know, sati, they'd say, oh, that's not for us, that's for like the monks and the nuns up in the caves in the mountains, Like, we don't
do that kind of stuff where we're super Buddhists. We care about morality and we worship local deities and all that stuff. But that's that's kind of advanced. That's more than the average Buddhist does. And it wasn't until I think the late nineteenth century in Burma that that was finally kind of broken up and meditation and mindfulness together were kind of introduced for the first time to like lay Buddhists, like just the normal, everyday, average Buddhists living their life.
Yeah, this is pretty cool, Like, I know, we love it when we can kind of pinpoint when things happen or when things change, and this is one of them. On November twenty eighth and eighteen eighty five, this is when the British Imperial Army conquered Burma and said, King, we're gonna mispronounce some of these Thibal Maybe I think that's right, you're out of here. And that king was
promoting mindfulness and promoting Buddhist institutions throughout the nation. The Brits, of course, said now we're not going to.
Really do that.
So it fell to the lay people to get organized, to find new places to meet, to find their own you know, gathering grounds, and a lot of times these were monasteries and it would go through monks, but they would it basically went to them to kind of figure it out because it wasn't I don't want to say state sponsored, but it kind of state sponsored.
Yeah, or state supported or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah. But so rather than being like, oh, well, I don't know who, I guess we're not Buddhists anymore, they took it by the horns and like they did something with it. But one of the outcroppings of that was that like these monks who used to just go meditate out in the like in the mountains or the hills
or in the woods. Now had audiences of like everyday people who were practicing Buddhists that they were teaching this stuff too, And it was it was one of these guys, Letty Sayadao, who was a Buddhist monk, who said, you know what, this isn't just for us, this is for everybody. And closely in Letty Sayadow's footsteps came Minga and Sayao
s a yaw say yao. I think that's right, and that monk was the first one to actually teach mindfulness and meditation to regular people, I think around nineteen eleven.
Yeah, I mean it's cool stuff.
Like I love the idea that Letty Sayadal kind of put forth, which was you don't have to go to a monastery, even like we've set these up for you and you can.
You don't have to retreat to a cave.
You don't have to you don't even have to go into a deep meditative state or anything like. Just momentary bits of mindfulness are very helpful, right, and that's a good way to reach each regular lay people. And I think through practice is when Sayel came along and said, hey, that all sounds great, and buddy, I'm going to teach it right.
So the people in what is now Miamar are the ones who kind of broke out, broke mindfulness of meditation out of its little slumber sure cage or something like that,
and democratized it a little bit. But it was as far as the people in the West are concerned, it was the Japanese in their development of Zen Buddhism that we have to thank because this is you can pretty much trace a direct line between the mindfulness and the meditation and the approach to Buddhism in the West today back to the twentieth century Japan and specifically a guy
named die Setsu Tei Taro dt Suzuki. So dt Suzuki was kind of a what's called a Buddhist modernist thinker who said, there's different things we can do with this, but let's approach us a little more rationally, a little less dogmatically, and open it up to people like our friends and what's soon to be me and mar and not only that, let's start relating to the West a
little more. And dt Suzuki actually kind of carried this message, this idea of Zen Buddhism with him over to America in Europe and it just started to catch on like wildfire.
Yeah.
I think it's really interesting too that it was another act of war that led to you know, that helped give rise to someone like Suzuki, just like when the Brits overthrow Burma. When the US Navy attacked Tokyo Harbor in eighteen fifty three, though was you know, basically Japan was like, you know, we got we got to start relating to the West a little bit more and sort of modernize, and this was known as the Meiji Restoration.
And part of that was saying, hey, Shinto is going to be our religion, our main religion, and not Buddhism, which led the Buddhists to say, hey, maybe we should modernize our religion as well, to you know, so we don't get left by the wayside, and that gave rise to someone like DT.
Suzuki, Right. So it was from that modernization that Buddhist modernism came about, and it's basically what you would recognize as Buddhism today, like very thoughtful, very interior dwelling, the idea that the universe is all connected. All these were like Buddhist thoughts before, but it was it was Buddhism allowing itself to be influenced by Modernism and by other groups like the Romantics and the Transcendentalists, right.
So they jumped on a big time. It was pretty It was like a confluence of perfect timing as far as coming to the United States and like the counterculture ready for this.
But in a weird way, it was like the United States, unbeknownst to the counterculture Beats and then later the Hippies, that their predecessors, like the Transcendentalists, had pre influenced what was coming back to them. So it was already in a very palatable form for Americans who were open to the idea of like mind expansion and taking acid and you know, and meditating and were just open to the ideas of other cultures of becoming like more in tune
with the universe. It was they were just waiting for it, and it came to them in the in the briefcase I guess of DT Suzuki and it just kind of took off from there. So the idea everything we understand about mindfulness and meditation you can trace back to like DT Suzuki in those beats.
Absolutely, And there were three people in particular in the seventies and sixties and seventies practicing this, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Cornfield and Sharon Salzberg who were not together but they studied separately meditation in Burma, and then the mid seventies founded the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, which became sort of the center of the uh VI Pasana meditation movement here in the United States. And they're they're still around, they're still doing their thing.
Right, So it was from that same group. There was actually a time where John cabot Z in the guy we mentioned earlier.
Z I by the way, not that would be too far on the nose.
Oh wait, what if his name was spelled z E n Oh, I got.
You, boy. I was not the current experience very well, I'm sorry, Oh that's okay.
That'd be like a boxer being named boxer. Yeah, it would be differently, right.
I was for some reason, I was going more toward the cabernet Zen play on.
Well because you're eyes in there.
Yeah. So he's known as the godfather of modern mindfulness according to The Guardian at least, which is a pretty legit newspaper. And by the way, they thank you also to Olivia for helping us out with this one. Chuck one to wrangle very great, Josh, she did, she did. But John cabot Zen was among those people Jack Cornfield,
great name, Sharon Salzburg, and Jason Joseph Goldstein. He actually taught at their Insight Meditation Society, and he was a big time practitioner of Zen Buddhism and he had he was on like a I guess a meditation retreat and he had a bit of insight well, I guess an epiphany is probably what you'd call it. That he was meant to help apply Buddhist techniques to help people who
are in pain. He had either a microbiology or molecular biology degree and he ended up applying it to medicine and figuring out how to join Buddhist practices and medicine to help people in the seventies and it really started to take off from there.
Yeah.
I mean, he sort of had the same idea as previous cultures, which was, hey, if we want to and not sell for money, but if we want to popularize this, we should get a little bit away from the religion part, the sort of hippie dippy New Age part, and he really wanted to start talking in concrete terms about things that everyone worried about, which was stress, and like, if you want to make your life less stressful, here's a way to do it, and more on mindfulness and less
on meditation, which was still a tough sell to mainstream America and still is today.
I think, yeah, but it's gotten less and less. I feel like he finally overcame the threshold that was, you know, keeping it back in the last like five ten years, and achieved what he was looking for. I mean, think about mindfulness is everywhere today and it is almost totally divorced from any kind of religious connotations. It seems like a neuroscience tool more than anything, the way that it's totally did in the West, and that was his goal.
He was trying to get it to the most people possible, study it scientifically, and then apply it to help people. And specifically again, he was initially looking at how it can help people with pain, and he came up with mindfulness based stress Reduction MBSR, which is still very much
in use today. And then there was an offshoot too, Chuck Mindfulness based cognitive therapy, and that takes CBT, which is a proven type of talk therapy used extensively in psychology and applies John cabot Zin's approach to mindfulness to it, right.
Yeah, And I think one of the big tenets here is to interrupt automatic thoughts, right, And the automatic thoughts that can lead to an automatic behavior. So the automatic thought might just be your propensity to feel that stress and reach for drink immediately and not even think like, oh boy, I need a drink because I'm stressed out
and that'll help out. It becomes this automatic thing. And he was all about and the practice of mindfulness is all about disruption and disrupting that flow without judgment.
Yeah, Because one of the big things in cognitive behavioral therapy is that you have a thought, your thought leads to a feeling, and your feeling leads to a behavior. And oftentimes it's, like you said, it's very destructive and you don't even realize it's going on until your life is kind of falling apart or it's certainly not as good as it could be. And it doesn't even have
to be a drink. It could be a donut, it could be yelling at a cashier at a grocery store, like all sorts of different things, and you are totally
out of control of it. The idea behind this mindfulness, adding mindfulness to cognitive behavioral therapy is that you are training yourself to detach yourself from all thoughts and emotions so that you can evaluate them clearly, so that none of them can jump out of nowhere pounce on you, and the next thing you know, you've eaten a dozen donuts and had six s gotches and you have no
idea why. You do have the idea why, and you probably haven't gotten to that point because you've stopped the whole process by recognizing it the moment it began ideally, theoretically on paper. That's the purpose of using mindfulness to help, especially with mental health.
Yeah, there's a journalist named Robert Wright, and he kind of put it in a way that I kind of like, which was to think of your thoughts and emotions as transient. So it's not like that kind of goes back to the no judgment thing. You can have these bad feelings and bad emotions and bad tendencies, but if you allow, if you allow them to just flow through you, they become transient. They don't stick around the same sort of ideas that you can't why worry about things that you can't control?
But not in.
A an office poster kind of way, you know what I mean. Sure it runs a bit deeper than that. It's not like a Pollyanna thing.
No, And as a matter of fact, like if you want to trace it all the way back to its original Buddhist roots, it's that like, we have very little, if any control over life, and that recognizing that will free us from all of our desires and the idea that like we have to have things that we want to hang on to. It like it just lets you let things flow by and you can enjoy them and experience them as they come. Rather than hoping for the next one, needing the next doughnut, or fearing the next loss.
You just experience life as it comes. It's kind of the point of that of understanding that everything is transient and impermanent, including your own your own life, Like you're going to die one day. There's ultimately the big like you know, like bingo number, Yeah, Like that's ultimate is you're going to die. You you yourself are impermanent and so understanding that through getting there through meditation. Daily meditative practice is kind of the goal.
Yeah, and it's interesting they found that it's even though something like MBSR is more rooted in that sort of neuroscience y thing and not spirituality or religion, they found it's sort of a chicken in the egg deal where once you do participate in MBSR, you may become more spiritual as a result, even though you weren't going in.
But I think the reason why is because even if these people don't know it, even if they're at a corporate mindfulness retreat, they're engaging in a deeply spiritual practice. That that it's they're kind of doing it wrong is we'll see, But there's still it's still, you know, part of this very long established tradition that's that actually has like legs. It's not it's not mumbo jumbo like. It actually has pronounced effect on the human brain, the human psyche,
the outlook that we have on life. And so depending on the context, you're doing it, and it can be very useful, it can be harmful, or it can be totally useless in some cases too. But it is a spiritual act. So it makes sense that it would make you more interested in spirituality.
Well, I say we take our second break, if that's good. And because we're stuff, you should know, we have to talk about whether or not this works and if there have been studies that tell us one way or the other.
So we'll get into that right after this. All right.
It's fun to sit around and talk about mindfulness, So fun, and to just sort of zen out and lose ourselves, become one with each other through these headphones.
Yeah, man, you sound like Rory cochrane and days.
And confused, Marthan new Man.
What was his name?
Oh Slater?
Was he Slater? Maybe you give me drugs man, Yeah, it's later. You're right, get some from your mother. Man.
It's funny.
I've seen him and he's been in a bunch of stuff since then. It's always impossible to see him as anyone other than Slater.
I mean, have you he was on CSI Miami. I think for years and years and years.
You're just waiting for her whip out of Dubie.
Yes, and he's all clean cut and everything and just still can't not see it. I totally agree with.
He's not fooling anybody, all right? So does this stuff work.
There have been plenty of studies, of course, and there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness programs can help people through emotional problems, through mental problems. They've done control trials of MBSR programs and clinical settings and non clinical settings, and they generally found that they do. And this is self reported stuff obviously, but they reduce self reported anxiety, depression, and stress and increase well being as opposed to people who've got no treatment at all.
Yeah, so yes, I mean it does seem to be effective. There's also, especially with self reporting, Chuck, that seems to be like the big one that if you look at studies where they're using self reporting, like it has the most pronounced effect. Objective tests there does seem to register some sort of effect like on the objective experience of say like pain or something like that. But social psychology has jumped all over this. It's like we're going to
study this. And there's this one study from twenty twenty one which I have to give a hat tip to Umi because she turned this one up. But it was a study of white people who some of whom received mindfulness training and a control group who received sham mindfulness training, which is hilarious, and the effect that it had on their willingness to help black people that they saw who they saw in need and not like you need, like
you know, homeless or something like that. Like they would be they would be subjected to a test unwittingly where they'd be in a room and like a black person would come in and like drop their papers, and their willingness to help that person pick up the papers, or if a black person entered the room and they were on crutches, their willingness to give up their seat. And apparently black people tend to help black people more, White people tend to help white people more, or spanning people
tend to help Hispanic people more. They people help their in group more. But this mindfulness group actually kind of crossed lines way more than was expected.
Right, Yeah, I mean I think that kind of says it all. You do help your in group more, But the people that received the real mindfulness training were definitely far and away more willing to step outside their end group and help someone of another race.
Yeah, you know they're.
Going to be said for that, Yeah, And I mean it was significant. Three times more is really significant statistically speaking for a study and it seems like it was a pretty good study. Like the fact that they had sham mindfulness training ruled out the possibility that the group that got mindfulness training was behaving a certain way because they they thought like that's what was going to be
the result of it, almost like a placebo effect. So the group that received sham training thought they were getting mindfulness training.
What they like?
They still that's what I want to know.
I would love to know what sham mindfulness is. Right.
It's like breathing, really concentrate on all the anger, really feel it.
They or they'd let them in like a lama's breathing where they're like, I don't think that's right.
That doesn't feel right, started to float away.
It's really funny, And shout out to cal State San Marcos and Professor Daniel Berry and I guess you.
Me for all that.
Yeah, sure, the trifecta, Yeah sure, what's a cal State San Marcos's mascot? Geez, I'm gonna bet five dollars on the Lobos.
That sounds good.
Okay, let's go with that, all right, Los Lobos even.
Yeah, that's the the banless Lobos is their.
Mak and not coincidentally, they're halftime entertainment as well.
But we do need to say that there's another school of thought, and it's not a competing school of thought, it's just a hey, be aware that it's not always great for everyone. They there's this one article you sent about people that experience trauma in their lives, that have buried it and it sits in their body as unconscious trauma that mindfulness practices and meditation practices can dredge that
stuff up. Yeah, And so they found that when these people they're studying them and they're doing these mindfulness practice they're experiencing like rage and anxiety, and it's like whoa, whoa, whoa. This is the opposite of where we're supposed to be edded here. And I think they had figured out in a lot of these cases it's people that are uncovering these bary traumas.
Yeah, and here's where we reach like the first initial part where the West has kind of screwed this up, because it is unexpected when somebody in America goes to a meditation retreat and tries to become more mindful and they're confronted with trauma or they're confronted with rage or self hatred or something like that, and they're not expecting it.
If you went and talked to like an actual like Buddhist monk, they'd be like, well, somebody probably should have told you that that's a real possibility, right that you're not This isn't all. This isn't like you know, it's like an acid trip. It's not always like flowers and sunshine. Sometimes it's like the darkest thing you'll ever be confronted with.
Kind of thing, same thing. The good thing about mindfulness meditation is that you can stop immediately, but it supposedly in some retreats, in some situations they're like, no, you got to press through. You got to press through. And people are kind of enticed or forced into staying in really uncomfortable trauma experiences way beyond their comfort zone. And
it can actually be damaging. And it's very rare from what I can tell, for there be to like lasting harm, but there are reports of people having to go to therapy for years after having gone on basically a bad trip at a meditation retreat for years years of therapy, so it can happen. And I guess, like I think, Chuck, there's a twenty nineteen study that found like twenty to twenty five percent of people who meditate reported experiencing unwanted effects, right,
like negative effects that they were not planning for. And that's that's the big problem. There's no there's nowhere, very little warnings about this stuff. It's all treated in a very pollyannish naive manner, as if like you know, America in Europe got its hands on unlike the the Secret the Cube from Hell Raiser is just like, this is awesome, Let's figure out how to be more productive using this thing. That's kind of what's going on.
Yeah, And I think another thing that can happen is it can lead to a spiral of anxiety if you're not able to get to that place that you think you should be getting to by practicing it. Yeah, So it becomes like this cycle where you know you're thinking, like, well, I'm practicing this meditation doesn't seem to be doing anything for me. Why can I not even do this right?
And all of a sudden, that is building upon itself and creating anxieties because you feel like you're supposed to reach this sort of moment of like floating bliss that is I mean that's really hard to maintain. Yes, yeah, I mean not maintained, but like even touch.
Even reach sure, and it's been packaged like that, it's been marketed is something that you will just reach some flow, he blissed with, And yeah, I can totally see being stressed out because you don't reach it because it hasn't been explained to you even what you're doing. Right. So there's it's a good little short read. It's called Mindfulness, Meditation and Trauma, Proceed with caution. I found it on
good therapy dot org. And it doesn't say like, don't do this even if you know your trauma, don't meditate, don't try to become mindful. It says some you know, make sure you find like a good coach, a good guide, a good teacher who understands how to deal with trauma and can prepare you for it and can pull you
back and be like, don't forget life's actually good. You're good, and now let's try a little more and just kind of, little by little expose yourself to it rather than like you know, ripping your shirt off and standing in front of like the baseball pitching machine.
Uh, there's when it comes to physical pain. That's a pretty interesting area as far as the studies have been concerned, Like the idea that can it out actually help reduce physical pain or at least the subjective experience of pain. And you know, in some studies, in some cases, the people who practice meditation do report lower subjective experience of
pain or what they call pain unpleasantness. So this might be a little bit of a mind over matter, Like the actual pain is still there, but I've gotten my mind to in such a place that the unpleasantness or the anticipation of that unpleasantness isn't as great as it would be if I weren't able to practice that mindfulness.
Yeah, which ties very closely into a Buddhist tenet of the first arrow of sufferings, which is where everyone has to experience that. Let's say you're bitten by an ant. It's not a very pleasant sensation, and everybody's going to experience it roughly the same. But there's also a second arrow where you can be worried about being bitten by an ant, and it makes the actually makes the first arrow ten times worse, not just twice as bad, but
ten times worse. And the idea is that if you're mindful, if you practice sati, you won't really experience the second arrow, just the first arrow. And that's the best you can hope for in this life.
That's right, missage Troyusa.
What that's from?
Uh?
I always just crack up when every time I think of an arrow hitting a human body, I only think of Monty Python.
When that guy takes the aero message Troyusa as he's dying.
There was one study, though, in twenty nineteen, a review of studies actually that found that NBSR can reduce severity of chronic pain or improve daily functioning and depression about like associated with that pain, which is you know, that's there's something to be said for that, Like I don't think it should only be looked at as some sort of hippie dippy thing like if you have real physical pain, it could possibly help.
Yes, And yeah, for sure, I mean think that that's kind of like one of the outcomes of it being exposed to westernization is that it's being studied. It's actually holding up in studies.
And boy is it being exposed Because if you work for a big corporation, if you especially work in Silicon Valley, chances are there are mindfulness retreats, maybe mindfulness rooms in the offices where they say, hey, we know we work you to death, and it's not fair. Why don't we set up this little room that used to be a room for you know, for your kids to come to work, but we don't let that happen anymore. Used to be the nursery. But we'll put you in here and you
can zen out and be cool. And here's one of the criticisms. As long as you come back and you get all that work done, we think it's a great tool for you.
Right exactly. And not just corporations, but the military is using mindfulness schools. Little kids are being taught mindfulness and to meditate prisons, and there's an enormous amount of like out just out there in the culture. It's gotten really popular. I guess in twenty twelve, just over four percent of Americans meditated. Five years later it was up to fourteen percent. That's a pretty big increase in just five years, and I would propose it's probably more than that now in
twenty twenty two. So it's everywhere. But it's also really kind of lost its way, I guess once it hit America and corporate America in particular, mindfulness kind of got perverted, I think, is a way you could put it.
Yeah, I mean that critique is really valid. It's great that a company might take mindfulness and the consideration as something beneficial for their employees, but to ignore the root cause, which is you're working too many hours a week and you're overworked and you can't possibly get done what you should get done, and that's where this anxiety is rooted.
Here's a mindfulness room so you can help correct all that. Like, it totally puts the onus on the employee to sort of self adjust to what's probably way too much work, instead of saying, hey, maybe people wouldn't be in this position to begin with if they didn't have to work sixty hours in a.
Week, right, And the same thing goes for social movements as well. Like some people say, hey, you know how like a lot of us are mentally ill these days. That's because society is screwed up. So rather than putting the onus again on the individual person just kind of suck it up and deal with it in a mindful manner, why don't we focus instead on these social problems that are causing all of these other social problems, so what we don't have to do that? And those are really
valid criticisms of westernized mindfulness in twenty twenties. And there's actually a term for it that a guy named Miles Kniel coined and another guy named Ronald Purser wrote a book using that name, It's perfect mic mindfulness.
Yeah. I love that word.
And they're basically saying like, hey, you guys have so completely detached this from ethics and morals and religion and and kind of co opted something that had its roots there that Yeah, you've you've there.
Needs to be a term for that. You've mixed micked it.
Yeah, you've.
You've mixed screwed it, you miffed it, You've make miffed it.
I like that, Uh, and that you know, you can't ignore the theological roots, uh and have it be the same thing.
And hr reps across the country say, oh, yes we can, yes, and look what happens. We're really screwing people up. So there's a there's like a couple of quotes I found that I really feel like kind of get to the heart of what happened when mindfulness came over here and got got picked up by corporate America and the military and just other surprising groups and maybe put to not
the best uses. There's a really good New York Times article from back in twenty fifteen that was kind of a meditation on the idea of mindfulness or the word mindfulness and what it means by Virginia Heffernan, and she says that what commercial mindfulness may have lost from the most rigorous Buddhist tenants that it replaced is the implication
that suffering cannot be escaped but must be faced. And that's that mispackaging, that miss marketing that we talked about, That the idea that if you meditate your mindful it's going to free you from all your problems, make you
less stressed and more productive and just happier. And that's not necessarily the case, because we in the West tend to really like to, like you said, avoid all of the stuff that really stinks and just get as much of the stuff that we like, and that's not what that's meant for.
Yeah, this I think is from the same article about mindful fracking. Could that be next? Putting in neuros science halo around a byword for both uppers productivity and downers relaxation to ensure a more compliant workforce in a more prosperous c suite.
Right there it is.
And there's another one too. The Dalai Lama apparently pointed out that even a suicide bomber would likely have to cultivate some sort of mindfulness. It's not inherently ethical. And if it's not inherently ethical, then that means that you could conceivably use it to nefarious ends. And the way that Buddhists for thousands of years kept it from being used to nefares ends is by encasing it in wholesomeness
like mindfulness. Specifically, what's called right mindfulness by the Buddhists is it's a wholesome approach and separating wholesome thoughts from unwholesome thoughts. And if you just take the mindfulness practice out of that context, you have a problem. You want to read that quote from Andrew Olenski.
True mindfulness is deeply an inextricably embedded in the notion of wholesomeness. Just as a tree removed from the forest is no longer a tree but a piece of lumber, so also the carrying attentiveness of mindfulness extracted from its matrix of wholesome coorizing factors, denigrates into mere attention.
Yeah, best attention. That's the best you can hope for. Is it just detegrates into mere attention and not something harmful, you know? So Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's wonderful that people want this and they're seeking it out and they're trying it. I think the people who are selling it to everybody need to just package it more transparently and explain the true purpose of it and stop using it for productivity.
Agreed.
If you want to know more about mindfulness, go research it and see if it's for you, and give it a shot, and go into it with right eyes, right vision. I can't remember. And since I said I can't remember, of course, that means it's time for the listener mail.
I'm going to call this tribute to Ziggi Bombach from his son Michael. We got a great email that I've been conversing with Michael for the past couple of weeks on this good dude and his dad was a good dude. Hey, guys, longtime listener recently lost. My father had had been going
through a great deal of grief. My dad was at high risk for catching COVID, so I made sure it was my priority to keep him safe and since being social wasn't an option over the past couple of years, we turned to nature during the pandemic and rekindled our love for the great outdoors, though he never had to rekindle his. He was born in Poland and immigrated to the States in the sixties and was only ever comfortable in his gardener in the woods. He was a simple
but passionate man. So we started driving out to western north New Jersey to Stokes for Est to get spring water and go fishing. It's a gorgeous part of the state. It was about fifty minutes each way. Perfect to introduce him to my favorite podcast, Stuff you should Know. Even though I had to describe to him what a pot cast was, he was instantly enthralled, and I can still hear him quietly asking in the car, if Chuck and Josh we're going to be broadcasting today, it's just adorable.
Like me, He adored your.
Ability to convey something complex and tough information, such as sweetened conversational way.
He would always come home and.
Tell my mom what he had learned was so much isolation the past few years. It was warming to hear him happy about all these new subjects that he was learning about. You gave him that happiness and made his life that much better of the last couple of years of his life. I can't thank you enough for everything that you continue to do. There's so much bad in this world right now, and people are hardly operating at their best, but you continue to do something worthwhile and
worth making, something worth learning. So thank you for making the life of Ziggy bomb Bach a little brighter towards his end.
And that is from.
Mike, and he sent me a picture of Ziggy and I read the obituary. I looked it up and Ziggy seemed like a great, great guy. And I had to zen out to reading this so I wouldn't cry.
Ye have cried every time.
That's a really amazing email. Thank you so much. It's impossible to not past judgment on that one. I'm going to say, I feel very proud, Chuck.
That's right in this case, great judgment and ri Ip Ziggy sound like a great guy.
Yeah, ri Ip Ziggy, And thank you Mike. I'm glad we could help bring you and your dad together. That's pretty amazing stuff. If you want to be like Mike and get in touch with us and write us the email of the century, we are willing to read it. You can send it to us at stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.